And Here We Go… A Restart and What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Blog

So I Took an Unplanned Month Off

As you may or may not have noticed I took a pause on posting in September but I have a monster end of year of push of posts planned – every other day for the foreseeable future!

What Happened

First off, life happened – I got the blog launched and then got caught in a grind of being one or two days ahead on posts and my day job is bananas in September…. and I had a lot of background stuff on the website to get done and got a bit bogged down.

Second – AdSense gave me a 30 day suspension because I clicked on some of my ads during testing on live posts… not a ton of clicks but enough to hit google’s radar apparently. I apologize – I frankly didn’t know / thought they were screening out my clicks anyways. I have some pride… I should be making a few penny’s off my thoughts so no money = no posts!

Third, I realized to successfully blog part time you have to have a queue of scheduled posts which was clear from some benchmarking reading. This makes sense so I embraced the two points above and rarely posted in September and scheduled all of my October posts already. I am not short on solid content but it is much easier to maintain something when you know if you take a day or two off and the machine runs. Done and much more enjoyable posts to write and hopefully read!

What They Don’t Tell You About Blogging on Those Side Hustle Sites

Some of these items are obvious in hindsight but as I was blinded by my passion project blog I did not see the following in my first few months:

1. A blog takes about an hour to two hours a day to maintain if you want to average a post a day. You are either writing, brain storming future articles, or promoting your blog. Yes you can delay a few days or two but without putting in the time eventually the blog needs attention.
2. Writing a blog post is much easier and enjoyable when you have your “choice” of articles to write and free time vs the pressure of finishing most articles. The enjoyability of writing is much improved when this pressure is off!
3. Promoting is indeed as important as writing the blog itself unless you want your blog getting zero views. Excluding pay per click advertisement, ultimately more links to your site = more search engine results. This takes time and everyone on the internet has a different opinion now a days on how to execute. There is no right answer other than promote!
4. I have a much better understanding of how the social media and internet companies work and make money. I was not expecting this but in general have been the most excited / happy for this to happen.
5. “Blitz” work is a big output driver at work and for my blog. I found a 2-3 hour power push on the blog was more efficient to get things done which helped reinforce some of my own work ethic at work. This work strategy played into having a queue of posts built up a month in advance.

So Here We Go

I paused but here we go… great content through the rest of this year! Enjoy!